Stress, Burnout, and Addiction in the Nursing Profession

By Herbert R. Warner

This book is about the most common issues that confront a nurse on a daily basis. It can cause him or her heartaches, heartbreaks, and heart troubles. Stress is, by far, in my opinion, a leading cause of heart problems, sickness, and depression in this country. In this book, I talk about awareness in our hospitals, clinics, and emergency departments. Everyone should feel comfortable and be confident of the nurse treating you or your loved ones; we must also remember that nurses are also human beings with issues and problems like everyone else in this world. This book is also a valuable asset to any nursing student considering going to nursing school or college to study medicine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493181650

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Herbert R. Warner Ph.D.

Library of Congress Control Number:        2014904262

ISBN:                  Hardcover                           978-1-4931-8166-7

                            Softcover                             978-1-4931-8167-4

                            eBook                                  978-1-4931-8165-0

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Rev. date: 03/14/2014

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One

Stress

Chapter One: Viral—It’s In the Air

Nursing the Nurse

Chapter Two: Feeling Stress-say

Chapter Three: Workplace Stress

Chapter Four: Can Your Words Cause Stress?

Chapter Five: Stress versus Burnout

Chapter Six: Reducing Stress

Part Two

Burnout

Chapter One: Is Your Hut Burning?

Chapter Two: Signs of Burnout

Chapter Three: Warning Signs and Symptoms

Chapter Four: World / Global Impact

Chapter Five: End Results of Burnout

Part Three

Addiction Section

Chapter One: When You Want to Stop but Can’t Stop

Chapter Two: Cost of Nurse Turnover

Chapter Three: The Addicted Nurse

Chapter Four: A Different Kind of Addiction: Electronic Age—When Is Enough, Enough?

Epilogue

Book Summary

Acknowledgments

F irst and foremost, I want to thank the universal God for giving me the wisdom and the energy to complete this book. I also would like to acknowledge him for giving me the desire to help people while on this life journey. I want to thank my lovely wife, Hortencia ( mi corazon ), for her support during late nights of writing. I would like to thank all the people who have encouraged me to finish this project. I would like to acknowledge all the nurses I interviewed about their experiences as a nurse and all the RNs who made a contribution with their input and opinions. I would like to thank all the people at Xlibris who helped me with this book project. I am grateful to them for their guidance and advice.

Stress, Burnout,

and Addiction

in the Nursing Profession

There are some jobs in which it is impossible for a man

[or woman] to be virtuous.

—Aristotle (384-322 BC)

Introduction

B eneath the beautiful decorated scrubs, jackets, shirts, caps, and colorful nursing uniforms are people who are tired, worn out, stressed, and burned out. They are mothers, fathers, girlfriends, boyfriends, and students who are gainfully employed and working to provide for their families and to further their education and career growth. When you think about a nurse, you picture a beautiful person, caring, compassionate, sometimes sexy, but that is not always the case. Some wear a mask to cover or hide the results from stress, burnout, and addictions that they have encountered during their journey in the health-care arena. Health-care reform was one of the themes of the Obama administration, with its billions of dollars’ cost, which still has not been fully implemented; they failed to address the cost of fallout from overworked, stressed-out, and addicted RNs in the health-care field.

Nurses regularly hear the phrases, You are a great nurse, Hang in there, Good job, Nice call, and you keep telling yourself, I am OK. I love my job, and crying most of the time, knowing very well that things are not going to change but will stay the same. Such praise can actually contribute to burnout. If someone says you are doing great, then you feel like you must keep going, and the real deal is, you don’t have to. When are the powers to be going to triage this bloody mess" of stress, burnout, and addiction with our frontline emergency medical staff? Where are our top medical and mental-health managers and administrators of hospitals? What are they doing? You answer the question. We spend billions of dollars on our nation’s defense by purchasing weapons of mass destruction to fight a proposed war on terror. However, we cannot give a small fraction of percent to help fund our mental-health programs. Finally, the government is talking about making mental-health practitioners a part of a larger network of insurance providers that get reimbursed for their services. They now realize that mental-health issues are a disease that must be treated like any other medical problems. But we had to wait to have a tragedy like Sandy Hook Elementary, where twenty innocent children and six adults lost lives. President Obama believes it is a gun-control problem, and I agree to some extent, but I would add also that it is a mental-health control problem. We as a nation have not given proper attention and funding to our mental-health population. People who have mentally diagnosed diseases are being released from institutions on conditional releases and restricted releases. This is not the solution to the mental-health problems or a solution to the person who is being treated for a mental diagnosis. Our state mental-health hospitals and local behavioral-health providers are not well managed or operated properly; money is thrown at these institutions, and they are left to manage themselves with little oversight. Government needs to pay attention to this issue and act responsible and fund these areas. Obama administration suggests allocating $10 million for research on the causes of gun violence; we need more research in the causes of violence offenders who have some sort of mental disorder. RNs are on the front line, along with counselors, who see and administer care and administer drug treatment; it is the RN who must be attentive